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Weird, geeky shell script projects?

Nov 30, 2007  By Dave Taylor

Alright, LJ readers and fellow Linux-heads, I'm asking for suggestions: what should I write about in the next few columns of my shell script programming column in the mag? I can certainly come up with stuff, but I think it'd be interesting to actually hear from y'all. So let me know! :-)

______________________

Dave Taylor has been hacking shell scripts for over thirty years. Really.
He's the author of the popular "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts" and
can be found on Twitter as @DaveTaylor and more generally at
www.DaveTaylorOnline.com.

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Can you live without it?

Patrício Batista's picture
Submitted by Patrício Batista (not verified) on Mon, 12/03/2007 - 06:15.

I sure can’t! Shell scripting saved me from so much tedious work during my sysadmin tasks.
Once I’ve used it to check the true resolution in more than 2000 image files, with some help from our most precious awk, sed, cat, wc, etc.

BASHing myself in the head

Shawn Powers's picture
Submitted by Shawn Powers on Fri, 11/30/2007 - 06:47.

I have a buddy that is a shell scripting guru. It seems that every time I need to solve a problem, he can send me a snippet of code 3 lines long that I tried to solve with 300 lines. And his works, where mine failed.

I also have a tendency to forget about the "testing" phase of shell scripting, and I have rm -rf'd my way out of a perfectly good weekend.

So while I don't have any real suggestions, whatever you end up writing, please know that dolts like me enjoy your column, even if my actual shell scripting is usually a stop-gap or an attempt to do something automatically that would take 40 years manually.

See there, I'm no help at all. :)

Shawn Powers is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal. You might find him chatting on the IRC channel, or Twitter

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